In today’s marketing and sales landscape, technology is always evolving and continuously improving. As marketing teams become more and more accountable for showing results on the bottom line, they are doing so by aligning their business processes with the sales team. And what does that mean? That means that they are just as responsible for keeping the CRM in good health as the sales reps. In other words, remain dedicated to data hygiene and duplicate management.
The most important thing that sales-facing organizations own is data. This is a key element for B2B marketers who are coming to grips with the fact that the CRM is an important component of customer information. It contains customer profiles, buyer journeys, and tells stories about how not only to turn prospects into customers, but how to move already-existing customers into repeat business.
Data Hygiene
There is an important point to be made when it comes to the company CRM and the way it is used. The key issue is ‘data hygiene.’ Data hygiene is the process of keeping updated records of prospects and customers. That means that inactive customers should be marked as such. And those that show activity should contain every piece of information about their movement throughout the customer lifecycle. According to Marketingsherpa, 70% of a marketing database will go stale within a year for such reasons as contacts moving positions within the company and changing jobs. These realities must be addressed.
Leading performers are always in the process of cleansing, enhancing and consolidating data. It becomes a core process of the business strategy because inaccurate data can have a detrimental impact on any business with the ability to hurt the credibility of an organization.
According to an Experian 2015 Benchmark report, 99% of organizations think data is essential for marketing success. That’s why leading organizations say in unison that the number one priority for any company is to invest in cleaning up data, and managing duplicate information. Top performing marketing and sales teams work to enhance, correct and expand a record by adding phone numbers that match contact names, adding email addresses, appending and validating data, and identifying duplicate entries.
Duplicate Management
An important part of keeping a database healthy is eliminating duplicate records. The journey of a lead to a customer needs to work seamlessly at each stage of the sales pipeline. The need to manage duplicate entries is critical to ensure that marketing campaigns are running like a well-oiled machine. Sending the same email twice to the same recipient may not be detrimental to your campaign at first, but if this continuously occurs, the results will hinder success.
The more you work on improving CRM / marketing data the more you will be able to accelerate success. How effective are you at keeping your data clean? It’s time to step up and take charge of your data.
